‘Magic Farm’ Review: A Semi-Entertaining Wasted Opportunity
While Amalia Ulman’s dexterity and strong cast practically save ‘Magic Farm’ from being a total disaster, the movie still leaves some areas to be desired.
There’s a lot of good in Amalia Ulman’s Magic Farm, notably how its do-it-yourself aesthetic, highly reminiscent of Eugene Kotlyarenko’s The Code, is always participative and in service of the faux-documentary a crew of clueless people attempt to create. Kotlyarenko is one of the film’s executive producers, which follows a group of filmmakers, comprised of Edna (Chloë Sevigny), Jeff (Alex Wolff), Dave (Simon Rex), Elena (Ulman), and Justin (Joe Apollonio), as they are headed to Argentina to profile a local musician and make a documentary about his impact on the town.
However, Jeff’s ineptitude results in the crew landing in the wrong country, which forces them to change their plans and reassess what they are going to film and showcase. They are so oblivious that, instead of discussing what’s directly in front of them, namely the town being sickened by glyphosate dumps via airplanes, where children are “born sick” and die of cancer, they invent a subject that has nothing to do with raising awareness to a pressing – and urgent – issue. This is, of course, Ulman’s desire to make a commentary on the vacuous spaces of “content creation,” where the “influencer” sphere has grown entirely out of control, giving nobodies who only care about their personal brand access to talk about themselves and the “perfect” lives they live in through the prism of an Instagram or TikTok video.
For a while, she certainly seems to want to make a movie on this specific throughline. Ulman undoubtedly transcends Kotlyarenko’s The Code by actively engaging with the subjects who purposefully look the other way and only mention glyphosate when they themselves are the victim of an airplane full of the toxic substance flying underneath them, and dumping it without a care for the human cost of using such a product. Her aesthetic is also more dynamic and immersive, employing GoPros and 360 cameras through unique angles, never-before-seen, in the era of post-digital cinematography.
While Sevigny and Rex are barely in the picture, Ulman compensates by focusing on Alex Wolff’s Jeff, who is likely the biggest, bumbling cretin of the entire crew. We quickly learn that everyone is a terrible person, even Elena, who hides a secret from Edna that she does not want to reveal, but Jeff takes the cake as the most despicable human being you can think of. Each protagonist may have some redeeming qualities if they stop caring about themselves, but Jeff is too far gone in his delusions that he will never be able to redeem himself. I won’t reveal much about his developments, but Wolff undoubtedly delivers the best performance of his career as a man whose personal brand is only an extension of his worst tendencies.
It leads into some of the film’s funniest parts, which fully lean into cringeworthy comedy as we’re forced to sit through Jeff’s egotistical quest of making this entire project about himself and his aspirations rather than his co-workers, who don’t get as much of the spotlight as he does. It’s in those awkward moments where Magic Farm shines the most, especially when the English-speaking protagonists don’t understand their Spanish-speaking counterparts, who make minimal effort to translate what they want to say, because they don’t want them to know what they’re talking about behind their backs. These moments are hilarious and full of humanity, giving Magic Farm a formal – and thematic – edge over Kotlyarenko’s disastrous COVID satire, despite borrowing heavily from his aesthetic.
That said, as much as Ulman starts strong and makes a bold statement right out of the gate, the middle section of Magic Farm sags in cyclical territory, where each two-handed dialogue conversation repeats the last one two characters had in the previous scene. The pacing grinds to a halt, and Ulman ultimately loses the potent message she wants to say about the cancer of content creation that exploits a culture in suffering for useless views, likes, and shares on the internet. Without the web, these people would be nothing, and care about nothing else but the “impact” they make online, making ridiculously inert “content.” They never stop to think about the place they live in, or the impacts that the disease-riddled community lives with. Even as they leave during the film’s final sequence, as they listen to the radio, which exposes a study linking glyphosate exposure to premature child births, they would rather turn it off and ignore what they’ve just heard.
This is pretty damning, and an effective way to get what you want to say across. But Ulman seems too busy filling her movie with as many meandering scenes as possible rather than having a focused goal to discuss how horrid “content creation” has truly become. That said, and thanks to her incredible cast, she succeeds more in at least raising awareness of the issue than Kotlyarenko attempted (and failed) to do for the COVID crisis in The Code. In that regard, she deserves our commendations, even if the end result leaves much to be desired.